[-empyre-] Will Pappenheimer self-Intro

[christina mcphe]

Brilliant, Conor.......!

Is there a youtube or vimeo walkthrough (movie made of walking around  
Dublin while 'in' NAMAland)...?
On Apr 28, 2011, at 8:44 AM, Conor McGarrigle wrote:

> Hi All
>
> I'd like to pick up on one aspect touched on in Will's introduction  
> which hasn't had much attention (I'm late to the discussion so it's  
> possible I missed it) that of AR as an interventionist tool and by  
> extension a tool for political critique, particularly as a method of  
> making visible information the authorities would rather was kept  
> quiet and if I can give an example of a project which I feel  
> illustrates the relevance of AR .
>
> My experience of AR is from working with Layar on a project called  
> NAMAland ( www.walkspace.org/namaland  sorry Dublin only) which  
> visualised an aspect of the Irish financial collapse. At the risk of  
> depressing you all with the details of what's going on here in       
> Dublin the project is an AR overlay of Dublin which identifies ~120  
> properties (pulling from a growing SQL database) which were bought  
> by NAMA a very controversial Government agency set up to buy bad  
> speculative property loans from failing banks, spending      around  
> €40b in the process. Information on NAMA properties is restricted,  
> the agency was exempted from FOI requests with a lot of powerful  
> interests trying to keep information from getting out (I've received  
> quite a few legal threats). So NAMAland was created as an attempt to  
> publish this information in an accessible format and I was able to  
> get my hands on an unofficial database pulled together from public  
> domain sources anonymously which I geotagged and published as  an AR  
> layar.
>
> The response has been astonishing it was immediately picked up by  
> the MSM who've been running with it ever since, it even featured on  
> the main evening TV news on RTE the national broadcaster and has  
> become very much part of  national debate on the financial disaster.  
> I regularly give talks about it and lead NAMAland walks through the  
> city even the name NAMAland has come into common usage. I attribute  
> the response in a large part to the fact that it employs AR  and the  
> power of the phenomenological experience of AR to make concrete what  
> had been up to then very carefully abstracted. If I had released it  
> as a list or a map I don't think the response would have been as  
> significant.
>
> On the important topic of access figures suggest that only about 35%  
> of the population can access it on their phones but it has still  
> gained a wider currency through word of mouth, through media  
> coverage and as I'm discovering it has a second life as a retelling.  
> Perhaps this is another aspect of AR? I haven't experienced the  
> Manifest.AR MOMA intervention but I'm still quite a fan through  
> accounts I've read and through seeing screenshots so I feel this is  
> an aspect of AR which can work for those who can't experience it  
> first hand.
>
> As a last point I do feel that this ability to query geotagged SQL  
> databases opens up so many options. I'd love to see an AR version of  
> They Rule or  Hans Haacke's Shapolsky et al or why not wikileaks?
>
>
> all the best
>
>
> Conor
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> WalkSpace for the iPhone
> www.walkspace.org
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 25/04/11 16:47, Will Pappenheimer wrote:
>>
>> Hello all.
>>
>> Patrick scheduled me for the last week of the ManifestAR month and  
>> since I haven't heard from him about this week, I thought I'd jump  
>> in. I’ve been following posts as much as I can while trying to get  
>> out of the fog of events we’re involved in currently. Also as a  
>> founding member of ManifestAR, I will start with a few opening  
>> remarks related to my interest in this medium and try and make them  
>> relevant to the discussion I have followed so far. My hope might  
>> be, with other interesting comments preceding, to explore AR as a  
>> phenomenological and a discursive medium.
>>
>>  Reality is always already augmented; by culture, by perception, by  
>> psyche, by desire, by institution, by nation, by science, by law,  
>> etc., etc. In fact when I say reality, I like to say, “so- 
>> called” reality. I derive a statement like this from my fuzzy  
>> knowledge of the no longer so reputable French philosophers. I hope  
>> it is clear that I do not mean it in any utopian sense. Tamiko’s  
>> intro demonstrates this point in the spirit or legend dimensions of  
>> human culture, and it is no less true I think today, though the  
>> animism might be directed more towards a popular culture. Artists  
>> and authors could well be understood as augmenters of reality or  
>> those who tamper with the reality that is already augmented.
>>
>>  While the idea that reality is augmented is not necessarily a  
>> spatial concept, and it can, as Patrick mentioned, be a systematic  
>> principle, the particular development of a located AR is what  
>> attracted me to this medium. While AR has been around for a while,  
>> to my knowledge it hasn’t been so geo-located as at this juncture.  
>> For the first time we are talking about digital or network  
>> constructs which are “here” or “over there” or about to  
>> “pass by in front of us” in public space. To convey a kind of  
>> phenomenological experience, and I think when we talk about  
>> phenomenology at this point we have to include an almost sensoral  
>> experience of Internet and computer life, because it is so  
>> integrated into what larger and larger portions of the world engage  
>> in daily, I want to describe both the process of making this work  
>> and the experience of viewing it through a smart phone.
>>
>>  Like a number of other members of ManifestAR, Mark Skwarek,  
>> introduced/ seduced me into AR and we have spent a lot of time  
>> together erecting both our projects and others in and around NYC  
>> and now Boston. It is important to convey that the process of  
>> making AR works is only half spent in front of the computer, the  
>> other half is spent out in the car, walking around in freezing  
>> weather, and at other times trying to get documentation footage in  
>> situations where cameras are not allowed. We are talking about the  
>> installation, adjustment and functioning of works in space and the  
>> recording of their presence that at times is a kind of “bootie”  
>> not unlike graffiti art practices. And perhaps, the greatest  
>> rewards of the final project is the engagement of the people on  
>> site, that they might have seen the augments, talked about them,  
>> blogged them or perhaps barred them from being viewed. One might be  
>> tempted to describe a principal of this work as juxtaposition, but  
>> this is a practice which involves more a mixture of digital network  
>> production, physically spatial positioning and public social  
>> engagement.
>>
>>  In this reincarnation of AR, the smart phone plays a big role, in  
>> my extended view of the contemporary phenomenological. Needless to  
>> say the cell phone is computer, social network, media conduit  
>> recorder all-in-one. It carries with it the weight of use value and  
>> the emotional ties of network social life (however impoverished one  
>> might judge them to be) that critical analysis will have to chase  
>> to keep up with. It transports the informational grid and self- 
>> identifies in the geo-located grid.  When you hold up the phone and  
>> turn the camera on you have the experience of seeing through this  
>> thin veil like device, linked into all that the Internet carries,  
>> to a live scene beyond. Peripheral unmediated vision lines up with  
>> screen vision. (And let’s not forget that whatever this  
>> deceptively simple technology masks in a black box, isn’t all  
>> perception mediated anyway?) Into this view appear the objects from  
>> AR, brought into being by the very same network that a large part  
>> of the world invests with increasing importance and  
>> interdependence. Thus cell phone AR, on location, in public space,  
>> is an intersection of networks lined up with physical space. It  
>> requires the body to move to see, without tethered headgear and  
>> expensive equipment. As Tamiko has pointed out, it often encourages  
>> a shared social experience of viewing.
>>
>>  Again, my intention here is to try and outline this experience,  
>> not to suggest an idealized technology.
>>
>>  A word about technological access. Certainly more than half the  
>> world is not privy to these technologies, and that fact should not  
>> be lost. But the other half of the world is and they waste no time  
>> using it and participating in it. Most of the millions using these  
>> technologies are far less privileged than we are, speaking as a  
>> university based educator. Compared to the previous computer  
>> science laboratory set up for AR, this apparatus can be downloaded  
>> and in use in five minutes and I think most cell phone users  
>> would        know how to do it. This as a little bit more like  
>> television access, which I think very few of us tend to think of as  
>> privileged.
>>
>> Another asset to this particular medium at this early moment, is  
>> that it is essentially un-privatized and primitive. The simplicity  
>> of 3-D objects and graphic elements that can be employed and the  
>> unpredictability of rezzing gives artwork in this medium a  
>> conceptual or conjectural quality that lets the viewer makeup the  
>> rest of the proposition. Many of the works we have engaged in  
>> suggest a larger possibility through an exemplary augment. This is  
>> not at all unlike other trajectories in art. What is different is  
>> perhaps that the content suggests a virtual life injected or  
>> superimposed onto a physical life. So instead of holding a gun in  
>> the air to suggest the shooting down of a plane (Chris Burden) Mark  
>> Skwarek erases the Statue of Liberty with a floating updating patch  
>> of sky downloaded from a real time WebCam. We should neither say  
>> that this work is purely conceptual, because it relies on a  
>> reasonably successful augmentation in situ. It needs to be carried  
>> out and many of us artists are interested in the aesthetics of the  
>> medium.
>>
>> Sander Veenhof’s Photoshoped sign at MOMA saying “No AR allowed  
>> past this point” which became the challenge for the “We R In  
>> MoMA” exhibition there, points towards the not yet but precious  
>> unregulated space that this medium currently offers, and perhaps  
>> not for long. I started this intro with the idea that reality is  
>> always already augmented and the question in this case might be;  
>> who controls the augmentation? If we can put any augment anywhere,  
>> and if augments are figured as examples of network objects of  
>> increasing significance, then the interest at this time in  
>> intervention or incursion into regulated physical space is  
>> understandably poignant. An augment that suggests a challenge to  
>> conventional or institutionally held physical and ideological space  
>> might indeed, as an image, present a formidable challenge. The  
>> resurrection of a virtual Tankman in Tiananmen Square by 4  
>> Gentlemen represents an example of this potential. As artists, we  
>> do not necessarily create works with an aim to effect social  
>> change. We might hope for this. I’m not sure we would be  
>> particularly good at effecting social change. We do it perhaps as  
>> an example, as a challenge, as a transgression. What is unique here  
>> is the advent of virtual challenges in a complex mixture of lived  
>> or mediated physical space.
>>
>>  My own particular interest has been to test the limits and  
>> boundaries of what is acceptable as art, with art understood as a  
>> social and categorical construct worth testing.  At this time,  
>> that’s not so difficult to do using anything known as “new  
>> media”. With located AR, the elite highly controlled spaces of the  
>> artworld can be permeated without permission and a different  
>> exhibition can be installed, if perchance to call into question  
>> what we think we know about as “real” and or “virtual”  
>> constructs in public space.
>>
>> Will Pappenheimer
>>
>> Artist and Educator at Pace University
>>
>> Email: willpap at gmail.com
>>
>> www.willpap-projects.com
>>
>>
>> Will Pappenheimer is an artist and professor at Pace University,  
>> New York. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at Fringe  
>> Exhibitions in Los Angeles, the ICA and Museum of Fine Arts in  
>> Boston, Exit Art, Florence Lynch, Postmasters, Vertexlist and  
>> Pocket Utopia galleries in New York, San Jose Museum of Art in ISEA  
>> 06/ZeroOne, Kunstraum Walcheturm in Zurich, the Golden Thread  
>> Gallery, Belfast, Ireland for ISEA 09, FILE 2005 at the SESI Art  
>> Gallery, Sao Paulo and Xi’an Academy of Art Gallery, China. His  
>> grants include an NEA Artist Fellowship, Traveling Scholars Award  
>> from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Turbulence.org,  
>> Rhizome,org at the New Museum and a large scale public network  
>> sculpture for the City of Tampa. His work has been reviewed in Art  
>> in America, NY Arts International, Art US, the New York Times for  
>> Art Basel Miami 2003, the Boston Globe, EL PAIS, Madrid,  
>> Liberation, Paris, Magazine Électronique du CIAC, Montreal,  
>> MSNBC.com and ZedTV, Canadian Broadcasting and is included in  
>> Christiane Paulʼs recent historical edition of “Digital Art.”
>>
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